Metamorphosis

It’s hard to know where to start in explaining the eleven months since my last post. For now I think I’ll leave it as saying I’ve had a career change, and I’m now working where I probably should have been a long time ago – in a motorcycle dealership. There’s of course plenty more to it than that, but to write about it isn’t something I can do just yet – there are too many tangled threads to pull together into a post that wouldn’t help me as the narrator or you as the reader to gain anything from it. Perhaps my brain, which had for so long worked to wrap structured models around complex scenarios, has finally accepted defeat in a war that it was never going to win anyway.

Enough crypticism.

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Taking it to the track

A work colleague who has just got his motorbike license asked me the other day how to get into track riding, and even though there are plenty of other ‘tips for track days’ information out there I thought I’d go right back to the beginning for, well, the absolute beginner. Why should I do it … Read more

FZR600 budget track bike mods

It was a few months back that I wrote a post about Billy-Ray, the barn find 1992 FZR600 that I converted to a track bike and took out to the smaller of our three South Australian road courses – Mallala. I’ve owed my fellow FZR boffin Fury Moto a post for a while on some of the mods I’ve made which have improved the FZR from stock, and finally I’ve got it done.

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Done. No, really this time.

Well, the saga of the 1989/90 FZR600 is over. Like, I’m seriously done with it. Countless hours, far more dollars than I’ll ever see again, many tears of frustration spilled on the shed floor, but it’s done. The rebuild the second time around was far less stressful. A big part of this was getting the … Read more

Billy Ray’s day at the track

I finally bought a GoPro after many years of avoiding it. I figured that if I’m going to try and get better on the track then it was time to have a look at myself from the outside, and what better bike to do it on than Billy Ray, aka the Victorian Parts Bike, named after Billy Ray Cyrus who was also a big deal back in ’92.

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